Best alternative to convert it to a G3 is to find a Sonnet Crescendo card. They'll not work if you have a cache module installed. The Radeon 7000 is worth having. With these 2 upgrades you'll be able to run RTCW on your machine, despite the official minimum requirements. Here you'll find everything to convert any PC video card to MAC: http://themacelite.wikidot.com/

IDE Cards: They don't work right on these machines. For some reason the 50Mhz system bus timing causes problems on the PCI bus with IDE cards, at least the ACARD ones. You will get broken/studdering audio and video playback on any connected drive. The onboard 10MB SCSI bus or PCI SCSI cards do NOT have this issue. I have no experience with the Sonnet PCI cards to know if they have the same bug. More info here: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/stutteri...o_fix.html

That link is about the PowerCenter, which is based on the PM 7200 'Catalyst' architecture. That is a known problem with that specific architecture, and it only appears when you install a G3 card... there's some incompatibility with the G3. It does not only affect IDE, though... it's also a problem with faster SCSI cards. I can verify that, as I tried sticking a G3 card in my PowerCenter Pro one time, and I ran into the problem straight away.

But to my knowledge, no such issue exists on the 8500/9500/8600/9600 machines. If there is a problem with the Acard controllers, then I'd suspect it's a problem with the controller itself rather than IDE in general. I ran an IDE card in my PowerTower Pro for awhile (which has the same chipset as the 8500/8600), both with and without a G3 upgrade, and never had any issue. It was a Siig ATA100 card, I believe. The only reason I went back to SCSI is because I very much prefer the performance of 15K RPM drives.

I was wondering too.. could I get a Radeon 9200 (about the same price as a 7000) or would I not have driver support on 9.2.2? I already found BIOS ROM's.

A 9200 should work, in theory, but I've heard of a lot more problems with it than with the 7000. I've personally always been inclined to stick with the 7000, since I know them to be completely stable and widely compatible (they'll actually work in OS 7), and the fact of the matter is, these old machines just aren't really fast enough to take advantage of newer video cards.

I mean, if you find a 9200 PCI cheap, then I don't suppose it'd hurt anything to try it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to look for one.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

A 9200 should work, in theory, but I've heard of a lot more problems with it than with the 7000. I've personally always been inclined to stick with the 7000, since I know them to be completely stable and widely compatible (they'll actually work in OS 7), and the fact of the matter is, these old machines just aren't really fast enough to take advantage of newer video cards.

I mean, if you find a 9200 PCI cheap, then I don't suppose it'd hurt anything to try it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to look for one.

OK I think I'll just stick with a 7000 to stay safe then.

You think I'll have any problems using a 50 -> 68 pin SCSI adapter on a 9GB drive?

Nah, it should work fine.

There is one issue with larger drives that you should be aware of, though. It's not related to hardware problems but a limitation in the old-world Mac ROM... the boot partition needs to be within the first 8GB of the drive. You can still use a larger drive without issues, you just need a <8GB partition at the beginning of the drive if you're going to boot from it.

Is there something like SpinRite for Old World Macs? If I could mark Bad sectors on these drives, I'd feel more confident that's the problem.

simbin wrote:

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

A 9200 should work, in theory, but I've heard of a lot more problems with it than with the 7000. I've personally always been inclined to stick with the 7000, since I know them to be completely stable and widely compatible (they'll actually work in OS 7), and the fact of the matter is, these old machines just aren't really fast enough to take advantage of newer video cards.

I mean, if you find a 9200 PCI cheap, then I don't suppose it'd hurt anything to try it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to look for one.

OK I think I'll just stick with a 7000 to stay safe then.

You think I'll have any problems using a 50 -> 68 pin SCSI adapter on a 9GB drive?

50>68 pin adapters are VREY common in macs. out of the 10 or so i got 2nd hand, 4 had upgraded 68 pin drives. one even used a 68 pin cable and had 3 upgraded drives. the 50-68 adapter was on the motherboard.

System 9 and the g3 power macs should be fine with large drives.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

A 9200 should work, in theory, but I've heard of a lot more problems with it than with the 7000. I've personally always been inclined to stick with the 7000, since I know them to be completely stable and widely compatible (they'll actually work in OS 7), and the fact of the matter is, these old machines just aren't really fast enough to take advantage of newer video cards.

I mean, if you find a 9200 PCI cheap, then I don't suppose it'd hurt anything to try it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to look for one.

The Radeon 9200 is a tricky bitch. I have no idea what's making mine not to work. Maybe I'll have to find another copy of Mac OS 9.2.2.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

But to my knowledge, no such issue exists on the 8500/9500/8600/9600 machines. If there is a problem with the Acard controllers, then I'd suspect it's a problem with the controller itself rather than IDE in general. I ran an IDE card in my PowerTower Pro for awhile (which has the same chipset as the 8500/8600), both with and without a G3 upgrade, and never had any issue. It was a Siig ATA100 card, I believe. The only reason I went back to SCSI is because I very much prefer the performance of 15K RPM drives.

It exists. This is based on first hand experience on my 8500 and 8600 with an ACARD AEC-6260M ATA66 card. The AV Optimizer solves the problem under OS9, but no such utility existed for OS X. I later switched that machine to a 68-pin SCSI drive to avoid the issue.

Would a radeon 9250 work? I'm guessing since with upgrades it can handle rtcw that is can starcraft and fallout?

Radeon 9250s can supposedly sometimes be made to work, basically using modified 9200 ROMs, but it's far from an ideal option.

It exists. This is based on first hand experience on my 8500 and 8600 with an ACARD AEC-6260M ATA66 card.

Well, like I said, it seems more likely that it's a problem specifically with the Acard controllers, or perhaps with the particular IDE chipset used on those controllers. Because I can say with first-hand experience that it doesn't happen with all IDE cards.

cdoublejj wrote:

Would a radeon 9250 work? I'm guessing since with upgrades it can handle rtcw that is can starcraft and fallout?

The Radeon 9250 works only for OS X. There might be a modded driver somewhere for OS 9.

well is it even hard to find a radeon 7000 or 9200? surely they are in abundance?

The PCI Radeon 7000s are pretty common, but the 9200s are a bit tricky. There are a lot of PCI ones out there, but the majority of them seem to actually be the 9200SE (whether they're labelled as such or not), which is a cut-down 64-bit version of the 9200. I don't believe those will work in a Mac.

The Radeon 7000 is the most friendly card I've ever seen. I have 3 of them (An original Mac Edition 32MB OEM, A PC one with green pcb, 64MB and 64k BIOS flashed with a Reduced Mac BIOS and another PC one with red pcb, 64MB and 128k BIOS flashed with the OEM BIOS slightly overclocked to the reference values) and all of them work without a single glitch on my modded B&W G3.

filipetolhuizen wrote:

cdoublejj wrote:

Would a radeon 9250 work? I'm guessing since with upgrades it can handle rtcw that is can starcraft and fallout?

The Radeon 9250 works only for OS X. There might be a modded driver somewhere for OS 9.

Not so

http://themacelite.wikidot.com/9250-trick

The last sentence says the author has written custom drivers for Mac OS9 that allow 3d acceleration.

The custom drivers he "made" probably don't amount to anything more than hacking the device ID in a config file somewhere to use the regular 9200 drivers with the 9250 (since they are essentially the same card anyway). Sorta like how you can fix INF files in Windows to use desktop drivers on 'mobile' graphics chips and other such things.

I imagine if you spent a little while spent poking around with ResEdit in the driver package, it wouldn't be too hard to figure out what the guy did and replicate it.

What has me more curious is the resistor mod. I have no idea what that mod is supposed to do, or what resistors are supposed to be changed in order to do it. Unfortunately the pictures are NLA, and the text description is kinda... nondescript.

Anyone know where to get a copy of MacOS 9.2?

I've got an iMac G3-500 and a beige G3 tower, both of which I'd like to resurrect - they were rescued from work and had OS X installed (I have a top spec eMac for OS X so I'd rather put 9.2.2 back on) and I only have OS X media and the free 9.2.x updates as supplied by Apple, but no base 9.2 install media.

megatron-uk wrote:

Anyone know where to get a copy of MacOS 9.2?

I've got an iMac G3-500 and a beige G3 tower, both of which I'd like to resurrect - they were rescued from work and had OS X installed (I have a top spec eMac for OS X so I'd rather put 9.2.2 back on) and I only have OS X media and the free 9.2.x updates as supplied by Apple, but no base 9.2 install media.

Ebay, just be sure you get a retail copy and not a restore CD made for a specific model of Mac. Sometimes you even get lucky and find someone liquidating a collection of Mac OS CD/DVD's then if you have multiple generations of Macs in need of an OS you'll be covered. I managed to find one guy selling every version from 7.1 to 10.1 in one package once.